A mother of two little girls is dead, gunned down walking into an apartment building on the South Side.

For most communities, that’s a tragedy that sticks, a moment that haunts neighbors and drifts in and out of conversations — heads shaking at the senselessness of it — for years.

In Chicago, it’s just Thursday.

That’s when it happened. Lashanna Howard was entering a building in the 5600 block of South Michigan Avenue, shots rang out, bullets struck her head and leg, and it was over. She was 27. Her daughters will now grow up without a mom and you’ll likely hear little more about her.

Because this is Chicago, and a young mother of two shot dead doesn’t stick. It barely makes the nightly news.

Chicago’s forgotten people pop up that way. Names on a homicide report. Or maybe faces on television when a politician needs someone — perhaps a mother in a violent community with kids to worry about — to stand nearby and hear his or her heartfelt concern about the unending violence along with promises of dribs or drabs of action, Band-Aids over bullet wounds.

Then the forgotten ones are gone, a politician’s useful ephemera, and either their memory or their continued existence is off the radar.

That’s Howard’s fate, no matter how tragic her death. The ripples of grief aren’t likely to spread beyond the children and family she leaves behind.

And then the dismal transition any Chicago reporter who covers crime has written: “Howard was one of nine people shot in Chicago from Wednesday through early Thursday.”

She was the worst in that span, the one people might read about. The 25-year-old man wounded in a drive-by followed. Three men shot in two attacks in East Garfield Park were next. Then a 26-year-old man shot in the leg in Logan Square. Then a 27-year-old man “shot several times in the head” in Grand Crossing on the South Side.

I read the details and considered Howard’s life and how she’ll be known only for her final chapter, fewer than 400 words followed by a roundup of the night’s other victims.

That one death alone — the death of a mom, the motherless girls left behind — would rock most communities. Maybe yours is one of them, a place where that kind of slaughter would fray nerves and break hearts.

But Chicago isn’t like that. This city will forget Howard in an instant, just as it forgets everyone on the nightly death rolls.

The politicians will take note of her only if pressured or if they see an opportunity. The people who ignore these neighborhoods, the ones who ignorantly say, “Oh, you can’t drive through there, you’ll get shot,” will see it as a tragedy in another world. The people who could actually make a difference, the city’s rich and powerful, will let it pass as part of an unfixable problem.

And Howard, except to those who loved and relied on her, will be gone.

A number on the year’s homicide counter. The victim of a Thursday in Chicago.

A forgotten soul in a city that doesn’t weep for a mother of two gunned down.